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Thanksgiving Fill-In

Directions: Fill in the blanks in the first four paragraphs of this Op-Ed from the Opinion section, “A Moveable Fast”. Use
your own words, or click “read more” to choose from a scrambled list of the words that were removed.

“It’s Thanksgiving — time to put our _________ on,” my family likes to say as we _________ for room next to the Pilgrim and _________ ghosts the holiday summons to our table. Our colonial
_________ probably would not disapprove of our having second and third helpings of sweet potatoes and stuffing, or even rushing off to watch _________ after the meal — the Pilgrims themselves played lots
of games at that first Thanksgiving in 1621. But I _________ they would find fault with our _________ for another reason: it is not accompanied by a _________.

To the Pilgrims and Puritans, the community-wide fast, or “day of public humiliation and prayer,” and the thanksgiving feast, or day of “public thanksgiving and praise,” were equal _________
of the same _________. But the fast was not merely a _________ for a community-wide gorging. Both customs were important components of a religious rite that served to _________ an _________ God who was believed
to punish entire communities for the sins of the few with starvation, “excessive rains from the bottles of heaven,” _________, crop infestations, the Indian wars and other hardships.

According to the 19th-century historian William DeLoss Love, the New England colonies _________ as many as nine such “special public days” a year from 1620 to 1700. And as the Puritans were masters of
_________, days of abstention outnumbered thanksgivings two to one. Fasting, Cotton Mather wrote, “kept the wheel of prayer in continual motion.”

_________ for rain during spells of drought were the most common reason for fasting. But Puritans also fasted whenever a _________, an evil portent, appeared in the sky; at the start of the Salem witch trials; and throughout
the various colonial Indian wars (Mather _________ that the horrors in King Philip’s War, against the Wampanoag Indians, had been sent by God to chastise colonists for the sin of _________).